


Golden Slumbers/Carry That Weight/The End

by yuletide_archivist



Category: Across the Universe (2007)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-12-17
Updated: 2008-12-17
Packaged: 2018-01-25 05:14:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,763
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1633415
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yuletide_archivist/pseuds/yuletide_archivist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Snapshots from the brain of Max, functional below the neck.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Golden Slumbers/Carry That Weight/The End

**Author's Note:**

> I tried to keep it lighthearted, but some of Max's crazy leaked in there anyway. I hope you enjoy the story, since Across the Universe is a fandom I've never even dabbled in before. The songs I chose correspond with the sections of the story, at least in theory. Cheers!
> 
> Written for lunabee34

 

 

**Golden Slumbers**

The recruiter leaned over him, his square jaw clenched. "Any reason you shouldn't be in this man's army, son?"

Max remembered - he thought he remembered - in reality he had said... recruitment felt like centuries ago. _I'm a crossdressing homosexual pacifist with a spot on my lung._

But here, now, he said, "Because Warner - Warner in my unit stepped on a mine, because I wasn't fast enough - I couldn't warn him."

The recruiter shrugged. "As long as you don't have flat feet."

But Warner stood looking over the recruiter's shoulder this time, staring at him with cold, accusing eyes. Rick Warner, barely older than Max, who had been with him all the way from basic. "What?" Max asked, shaking.

"You couldn't warn me," Warner said, his voice scraping out from his chest. Max's shakes got harder, and he squeezed his eyes shut hard. He didn't want to see. But his eyes flew open again, scared, as he felt cold hands on his shoulders. Warner's face was right there in front of his own, his mouth pulled into an accusing frown. And then he was in the jungle, and Warner stepped on a mine, and bits of Warner flew in every direction, and the enemy came charging out of the jungle firing at them, screaming, and there was Warner, everything below the waist blown away in fine red paste. Max recoiled, bullets whizzing in the air around him.

He clearly remembered what had really happened. He had fallen to his knees beside Warner in the dirt, his rifle dangling uselessly from the strap, willing him not to be dead. But he was dead. Someone in the retreating unit had grabbed him, hauled him up, knocking off his helmet. Max didn't even remember taking the shot to his head - the luckiest thing, his unit had said, that it just grazed him, since he was sitting there staring at the surprised look on Warner's face like he just couldn't believe it.

Warner didn't look surprised in the dream. As Max watched, frozen, the life came back into his dead eyes and they narrowed, glaring hard at him, glassy, accusing, and his lips moved - "You killed me." And then Warner's face was Jude's face and Max woke up with a yell in a cold sweat.

He scrubbed a shaking hand over his face, disoriented for a few seconds. The air smelled wrong - there was no rain in it, and a heavy ozone tang.

"Max?"

He jumped, scrambling wildly out of bed, and stood staring at the weary expression on Lucy's face. Then he remembered he had been discharged, was back in New York.

Vietnam was hell on earth. The only thing that had kept him from jumping in front of a Viet Kong rifle and ending the whole fucking thing was the memory of the family he had left behind in New York City. Not his parents - he hadn't heard from them since after Harvard - but his _family._

When he came home he found Sadie gone, Prudence vanished, Jojo stuck in a depression, Lucy mixed up with a bomb-making psycho-

Jude deported.

"I'm sorry," he said quietly, sitting back down. "I'm sorry, Lu. I was - I had a nightmare."

"About - over there?" He didn't answer. "You never talk about it."

"I can't." Because if he told her, that would bring her there. And if Lucy was in Vietnam, then he wouldn't have anybody. But he'd never tell her this aloud. She hadn't been able to understand when he wouldn't talk to her in the hospital, when he just sat and stared at the ceiling for hours, and she wouldn't understand how he was still unable to separate New York and Vietnam in his head. "You never talk about what happened with Jude."

"Nothing happened with Jude," Lucy said quickly. "I told you - we were both arrested at the protest. Jude got deported."

But Jude hadn't written, and Lucy hadn't written to him. Max might have been half-crazy - maybe all crazy by now - but he wasn't stupid. No letters meant there was no reason to write. Max figured they had been in a fight, or else Jude would have turned right back around once his foot hit English soil.

If she didn't want to talk about it, he couldn't make her. Lu had always been stubborn like that - normally Max admired that, but this time she was just being stupid. Jude was family. His best friend. His brother, he guessed, since the guy had been dating his sister.

"Did he leave an address?"

Lucy's lips thinned and she crawled back into bed; little more than a sleeping bag and a pile of blankets on the floor of the terrible run-down place they now rented, ever since Lucy had found the goddamn bomb squad in their old apartment. "Go back to sleep," she said.

Max slipped back into his own pallet, a shiver running down him in New York's cold air. Winter hadn't completely receded, still clinging to the air at night, and he and Lucy slept with a foot of space between them. It made him think of the nights in the old apartment when he had woken up to find Lucy tucked under his arm and Jude's limbs thrown over him from the other side, the three of them huddled together in the midst of whoever else had happened to pass out on Sadie's floor the night before (Prudence curled up against Lucy's back - she always eyed Max defensively, half-guiltily before they dropped off, and Max rolled his eyes at her).

Of course, that was before he and Jude had switched places, and Lucy slept content in Jude's arms. Pru and Max sprawled together on Jude's other side, and every once in a while Max would catch an elbow when one of their arms flung out too far and smacked Jude in the face.

**Carry That Weight**

Max clenched his jaw and resolutely rode out the flinch that wanted to take him when Lucy leaned over his shoulder to read the front page of the newspaper on display at the stand. "That's our old apartment," she said, alarmed.

"Yeah," Max said. "Says your ex-boyfriend was inside."

"He wasn't my boyfriend," Lucy snapped, with too much heat to be just a response to brotherly teasing.

"So that's what you and Jude fought about," he said, paying the newsstand and grabbing a copy of the paper. "In case you hadn't really figured it out yet, Lu, guys who make bombs in girls' apartments aren't heroes of the social revolution."

"Shut up, Max," Lucy said.

"Jude was right," Max continued, reading the paper as he walked. "This guy was a grade-A psycho. I'm just glad we weren't anywhere near when this thing went off." The picture on the front page, of the gutted building where they used to live, made his gut twist in memory of what that kind of thing could do to people. Without even being there, he knew what the remains of the men inside would look like. Fine red paste.

"Shut up, Max!" Lucy repeated, louder.

"All right, all right. You've gotten awful touchy, Lu."

"You've gotten awful crazy, so I guess we're even," she said viciously, and Max actually stopped in his tracks, staring at her. She stopped too, turned around, glaring at him. After a few seconds, what she said must have sunk in, because the glare fell right off her face. She looked mortified, and opened her mouth to apologize, but Max just started laughing.

"Fuck, Lu, if you're that crazy about him, why don't you just write him and ask him to come home?" Thank God, is what he thought. Thank fucking God that she could snap at him again, tease him again, stop treating him like he might flip out if she looked at him funny.

Lucy's mouth snapped shut and she turned back around. "It wasn't just me," she mumbled.

"Well neither of you are going to be able to apologize with an entire ocean between you," Max pointed out. "Did he leave an address?"

The same question he had asked the night before, and this time it seemed to get through to her. She looked down at her shoes. "I left it in the old apartment."

Max sighed. "Where the hell did he say he came from? Liverpool? Where the hell is Liverpool? And how many Jude Feenys can live there?"

Lucy looked back at him, incredulous. "You're not planning to call everyone in Liverpool until you find Jude, are you?"

Max grinned, the same grin his unit told him made him look 'like a crazy stoner hippie.' "Collect," he said.

**The End**

They all stood across the street from the sagging, burnt-out wreck of their old building. Jude and Lucy stood wrapped firmly in each other's arms like the tiniest breeze might rip them apart. Sadie leaned over to him and nudged him. "So who do I get to blame for blowing up my apartment?"

"Blame Lu," Max said. "It was her bomb-making psycho."

"Shut up, Max," Lucy said, but without the heat she had said it with the day he had spent hours on a pay phone to England, trying to get someone to tell him where he could find Jude Feeny.

"Well I could say it was the Viet Kong, but that's the crazy in my head talking," he said.

"Thought you said you were fine," Jude said.

"I said everything below the neck works fine," Max said, with a light punch in the shoulder. "Up top, I'm even more fucked up than that one time you me and the boys passed out in the lounge of Harvard, remember?"

Jude groaned, shaking his head. "Someone remind me to keep the bloody crazy bastard out of my room then, 'cause that night at Harvard was insane."

"Room?" Max asked. "Room? We don't even have a place to _live_ yet."

"Sure we do," Sadie said. They all turned and looked at her, incredulous. "What, you think I'm a rock star for nothing? You can come live with me."

Max grinned slowly, turning away from the burnt-brick building and back to his family. "Just like old times, huh?"

"Yeah, just no more eating my cereal right out of the box. You know that drove me crazy."

"Will do, sir," Max said with a mock salute, throwing his arm over Jude's shoulders and nearly knocking him and Lucy over. For once, the roaring of helicopter blades and jungle rain and the occasional thunderbolt of falling bombs was mercifully silent.

 


End file.
